Some thoughts floating through my headache-rattled head after writing the Olympic post –
It strikes me — I’ll admit this is not terribly original — how similiar religion and other belief systems actually are. Take nationalism. Nationalism can be described, crudely, as a worship of nation. One puts absolute faith in the Motherland/Fatherland, my country right or wrong. Questioning is discouraged, conformity rigidly maintained. Nations even have myths, replete with mythical figures that are more than human, that serve to bolster and justify the nation. Truth takes a distant second to expediency in those myths.. In its most extreme forms, it becomes, just like religion in its extreme forms, a terrifying force.
Communism, as it became in the warped, Big Man forms of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, is another prime example. Absolute obedience is required; even the slightest questioning is discouraged. Stalin provides the best example — the purges of the 30s and 40s are terrifying in how little was needed to destroy people. The Party becomes the sole source of knowledge and truth, and the leader is elevated to a godlike status. The words used may change, but there is little, functionally, to differentiate Stalin, say, from the God-kings of old.
We tend to see these things — religion, nationalism, other -isms, as somewhat separate categories. But the similarities are too strong. That shouldn’t surprise us, because it’s a recent development in human history to see government and religion and other institutions as somehow separate. In tribal cultures, religion is tightly wound into everything, and that continued when civilizations emerged. As I noted in my post on fear and religion, the fight between priesthoods and temporal leaders is old — but it was always couched in religious terms. Akhenation started a new religion to combat priestly power. The Holy Roman Emperor invested bishops and priests, tying them to him with marriage alliances and wealth; the Pope responded by claiming sole right to invest, and by the creation of the celibate priesthood that would, theoretically, be loyal only to him.
The secularization of European culture, though, led to a deeper split between the political world and the religious one, so that new movements — such as nationalism, and the uber-national movements like Fascism and Communism — took off. It’s probably not surprising that those political movements have many features akin to religion, because the political world had been saturated with religion from the beginning. The other inevitability is how these forces often combined with each other, and with religion. Fascism tied itself to religion and nationalism, Communism tied itself to nationalism, etc, etc.
Religious opponents of atheism often love to trot out people like Stalin and Pol Pot to say, ha! Atheists are evil! What they fail to notice, however, is that atheists hate those people as much as they do. This is an area where concentrating on the “god” notion gets us off track — our real fish to fry (if a vegetarian can use that phrase) are faith and unreason, and that is precisely what we see in the rabid nationalism, coupled with Communism and Fascisim, in the 20th century. Faith is faith is faith, whether it be in God and his buddy the Pope, or in Stalin and the Party. Maybe what we should tell Christians and other monotheists is that we agree with them on something — we despise idol worship. Only we add their god to the list of idols. (yes, I know I’m stealing the quip about everyone being atheists about every god except theirs, and we atheists just go one further.)
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13 September 2008 at 4:06 pm
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